‘Gentlemen, I’ve never seen a more straightforward case. Not in all my years.’

I’m too tired now to hold myself upright. But I have to. I must listen, until the end.

‘My friend, Mr Pettigrew ‒ more a learned friend than a sensible one ‒ has done his best.’ He smiles down at you, where you sit fidgeting with the pink ribbon on your brief. ‘He has tried to harangue you with all kinds of nonsense. But when you blow his puffery away, what is left? Nothing. Sleepwalking! Sleepwalking and amnesia!’ He snorts. ‘Perhaps he should take up the pen, gentlemen . . . One might well say he’s as much of a fantasist as his client! Perhaps he, too, has been taken in by her. Like Mr Benham was.’ He shakes his head. ‘But, gentlemen, in this court, we trade in fact.

‘The notion that sleepwalking could explain these crimes, let alone excuse them, that would be a murderer’s charter!’

It speeds up now. All eyes turn to the judge. His quill drips over his papers as he speaks, ink crawls across them, and his clerk reaches up to move them to the side, just as he’s been serving him, tenderly, quietly, attentively, the whole way through.

The judge turns to the jurors. ‘Gentlemen, you are now charged with considering what you have seen and heard and delivering your verdict. It is true that, as a matter of English law, murder must always have that constituent part, malice aforethought and that, in our law, malice aforethought requires consciousness. If you believe the prisoner did in fact commit these crimes, but without that requisite degree of consciousness, because she laboured under a state of mind that was so disordered as to deprive her of responsibility, then that would be akin to automatism, which Mr Pettigrew mischievously suggests must have the same effect as the defence of insanity. To wit, the essential element of malice aforethought would not be there and the charge would not be made out. It is a novel argument, but it is one which it is your misfortune to have to trouble yourselves with.’

You look up, give a small shake of your head. You’ll fume later about his choice of words – mischievous, misfortune – but you make no objections while they’re being said.

‘I know it has been a long trial,’ he continues. ‘I leave it to you to put an end to it.’

Then, time bearing down on me, catching me at last. The past, the present, the future, all at once.

Newgate Prison

Chapter Forty-Six

There’s one more story left to tell.

21 October 1824

Male infant of Paradise plantation, 10 months old or thereabouts.

Length of body: 26 inches

Circumference of skull: 17 in

Weight: 16 lbs

Born to Calliope, 20, Negress, bought off Montpelier estate, Antigua, from Mr Buxton Hardy, together with her infant, by Mr John Langton, Paradise estate, Jamaica.

Head and skin covered in a pale down fuzz. Skin dry and firm. Suet-like complexion but normal colour in the gums. Nose, flat. Hair, woolly. Broad, flat features of the Negro. Eyes disproportionately placed, asquint. But complete lack of pigmentation in skin and eyes defies racial origins. An albino. Intend to conduct examination, as Buffon did with his white nègresse, Geneviève. Believe it will be possible to contradict his supposition that the condition is a degenerative fluke. To begin with, examination of skin specimens is proposed. Thereafter the child will be kept for further extensive study.